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It was Monday, and Paul was starting the week hungover. He popped a handful of Advil. There was nothing he could do about the circles under his eyes. His head pounded.

He’d begun to wonder if Galkin had been drunk, too, when he offered to invest fifty million dollars with Aquinnah. But the morning after the meeting in the Russian’s study, Bernie Kovan knocked on Paul’s office door.

Fifty million bucks had shown up in Aquinnah Capital’s Partners Fund Number Three. Attention: Paul Brightman.

What the hell was this?

Paul explained that Tatyana’s father, his future father-in-law, wanted to invest with him. But the fund wouldn’t be open for a while, and there was a waiting list of investors who wanted in. Because Paul was a star, Bernie was willing to make an accommodation.

“So you’re marrying into the Galkin fortune,” Bernie said. “Mazel tov.” He wasn’t smiling.

Paul nodded.

“I wonder what you’re stepping into.”

Paul tried to grin, but it came out looking more like a grimace. “He’s a good guy,” he said.

“Uh-huh,” Bernie said as he turned to leave.

*

But how Paul would invest the money, he had no clue.

Until a weather report gave him an idea.

It was a news dispatch on Bloomberg Radio about a cyclone forming in the Indian Ocean near eastern Africa. Ordinarily, it was the sort of news he didn’t pay attention to, as it involved a part of the world he knew little about. But then he remembered how, at dinner a few weeks ago, that know-it-all Arthur had gone on and on about vanilla beans, and it made him think.

He did some quick research, then he stopped by the office of one of his senior colleagues, Pete Ambrosino. Pete, who was in his forties, beefy with a chafed face and little wire-rimmed glasses, was a good-natured, fairly nerdy commodities trader. That meant he bought and sold things like lumber and gold and sugar and uranium and pork bellies—real stuff, unlike stocks, which were basically financial promises. As far as Paul understood commodities, you were buying and selling these concrete objects based on what you expected their price to do. Will the price of oil go up next March or go down? That sort of thing.

“Got a minute?” Paul asked Pete. His headache had finally disappeared.

“I’m just going cross-eyed staring at gold futures, so, yeah, I have a minute,” Pete said. “I have an hour. I have hours.”

“Ever trade vanilla futures?”

“Vanilla?” Pete cocked his head. “No such thing.”

“You can’t buy futures in vanilla beans the way you can with, like, silver?”

Pete shook his head. “Market’s too small.” He tapped at his keyboard. “The global market for vanilla is . . . around a billion dollars. Way too small for futures.”

“So if you’re convinced the price of vanilla beans is going to go up, how do you make money on it?”

Pete closed his eyes, tipped his head back, and bared his teeth. That was what he did when he was thinking hard. “Who uses vanilla beans? Like, H?agen-Dazs?”

“They’re owned by General Mills,” Paul said. “The price of vanilla beans, up or down, is barely going to move General Mills stock at all. Then there’s the Nestlé corporation, but that’s probably too big, too. Same issue—vanilla’s not going to move the needle much. All right, so who does General Mills buy vanilla from?”

Pete’s fingers danced over the keyboard like a concert pianist playing “Flight of the Bumblebee.” “They buy it from a company called Beatrice Cade Extracts and Flavors,” he said, “and that’s a publicly held company. Then there’s the Nelson-Holcroft Vanilla Corporation. They’ve got to be big into vanilla beans.”

“Sounds like it,” Paul said. “I mean, turns out vanilla is in, like, everything. It’s in pharmaceuticals, perfumes, cosmetics, baked goods, beverages, chocolate, baby food, whiskeys—all over the place.”

“And what makes you think the price of vanilla beans is going to go up?”

“Bad weather coming in Madagascar, which produces eighty percent of the world’s supply of vanilla.”

“If you know that, so does everyone else on the Street. Right?”

Maybe , Paul thought. But not everyone’s thinking about vanilla beans. Too small a market. The more he thought about it, the better he liked his idea.

*

He next went to Bernie Kovan’s office. Bernie was stalking around the room with Bluetooth earbuds in, talking on the phone. He held his index finger up in the air, telling Paul to wait a moment. Paul settled into one of the visitor chairs in front of Bernie’s messy desk.

Bernie Kovan spent a lot of money on his suits, got them tailored on Savile Row, in London, but somehow, on him, they looked like cheap knockoffs. He wore frayed Lands’ End button-down shirts and unfashionably wide ties. He hadn’t gotten the memo about shoes, either: he wore wide-toed Clarks Wallabees with his fine suits. He claimed they were much more comfortable than bespoke leather dress shoes.

Finally, Bernie ended his call, turned to Paul. “What’s up?” Bernie liked Paul just on general principles, but he particularly valued him because of how he’d saved his ass on the Cavalier deal.

“I have a plan I want to run by you.”

“Go.”

Paul started explaining his idea about vanilla beans.

When he’d finished, Bernie laughed. He leaned back in his chair, looked up at the ceiling for a few seconds. “This is a total crapshoot, you know.”

“Maybe.”

“Fifty million bucks is bupkis for this guy.”

“I know, but it’s what I have to work with.”

“If you double his money, will he invest with us? I mean, serious money?”

“He didn’t say so, but it does feel like I’m being auditioned here.”

“Huh.” Bernie looked off into the distance. “Well, let’s kick the tires a little bit . . . So you want to buy put options on companies that buy a lot of vanilla, that depend on vanilla. Beatrice Cade and Nelson-Holcroft and Nestlé. Figuring that when the price of vanilla shoots up, their stock will take a hit.” By “put options,” Bernie meant buying the right to sell the stock at a certain price by a certain time. If the share price goes down and you have the right to sell its stock at a higher price, you can make serious money.

Paul nodded. “Vanilla goes into a whole bunch of Nestlé products. If they can’t get vanilla, all those products are delayed, maybe even for several quarters. That definitely tanks their stock. Or they switch to artificial vanilla flavoring, which is different, and word gets out and they still take a hit.”

“Well, at least you’re spreading the risk around. Okay. But won’t you need boots on the ground in Madagascar to make this work?”

“Probably,” Paul said. “I’ll go myself.”

“That’s just not going to happen. You’re too valuable here. Send an associate and an analyst. Send Chris and John.”

“You don’t mind?”

“Not at all. Why not? Chris speaks French, and you’ll want a French speaker.”

Chris Langley was an associate at the firm. He’d gone to Exeter; done a school year abroad in France, where he became fluent in French; and then graduated from Stanford Phi Beta Kappa, where he’d played football. He was twenty-seven and just out of the Harvard Business School. John Kapinos was twenty-three and a summa cum laude graduate of Williams College, a newly hired analyst.

Bernie continued: “They’ll both enjoy the trip. It’ll be an adventure. But I’ll tell you something. I don’t want them walking around Madagascar with five million dollars in cash without any security. Call Smith Brandon or Kroll and ask them to send a couple of French-speaking ex–Special Forces brutes to accompany them.”

“That’ll cut into our profit—”

“I don’t care,” Bernie insisted. “They have to have security. That’s nonnegotiable.”

“Got it.”

“Spend a couple hundred grand to protect five million in cash? Worth it. But are they going to know how the vanilla bean market over there works?”

“I’ve done a little research, and I’m going to make a few calls. The thumbnail goes like this: the farmers sell their beans, cured black vanilla beans, to ‘collectors,’ who sell to exporters, who in turn sell to big flavor companies, who make vanilla extract out of the beans and sell that to Mars and Nestlé and Unilever.”

“But you want our boys to buy directly from the farmers?”

“No, from the collectors . The middlemen. Fifty million is going to buy a sizable chunk of the market.”

“Know what? Throw in another fifty from the firm.”

“Terrific.”

“Maybe bring in some other investors. You’re probably going to be able to corner the market.”

“Yeah? Great.” Paul hadn’t expected Bernie to invest in this gambit, but that was a good sign. It showed his confidence in its working. “With a hundred million bucks, we’ll corner the market for sure.”

“I like the sound of it,” Bernie said. “But once you buy a hundred million bucks’ worth of beans, what do you do with it all? I mean, that’s an awfully big pile of vanilla beans.”

“That’s the tricky part. They have to put the beans in containers and store them somewhere safe. That means they need refrigerated containers. Climate-controlled, to protect the beans. Dehumidifiers and air conditioners and such.”

“That gonna be a problem?”

“Nah,” Paul said. “That part of the world, climate-controlled containers are everywhere. Our guys will be able to lease them. Or outfit them, if they have to. Load ’em up, then move ’em out of Madagascar and away from the path of the storm. Maybe a few thousand miles north, into warehouses in Mombasa.”

Bernie placed his hands flat on the glass top of his desk to signify that he was done and it was time for Paul to leave. “This is going to be fun, Paul. I like it.”